Real World Blog

I don’t know about you, but those P&G commercials really nailed me as a parent (even though I’m not a mom). Part of the reason they’re so effective is that they have everything to do with that idea of purpose—fulfilling our purpose as parents and giving our kids big goals to aspire to.

Blogger Tim Challies recommends a series of six posts by Jay Younts at the Shepherd Press blog on the topic of Talking with Your Children about Marriage & Sex. Younts encourages parents to A) enter into that conversation and B) to be careful not to separate the mechanics of sex from its place in marriage as secular sex ed is likely to do.

Study: “Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active.”

The USA Today story sites results from three studies, actually, in which it was found that teens did better when their parents set limits on their behavior. The studies include one on media consumption limits, one on bedtimes, and a third on teen driving rules.

Matt Perman: “One reason focusing on strengths results in the greatest growth is because it is motivating. People like to do what makes them feel strong (the definition of a strength — note, a strength is not merely what you are good at), and so they are intrinsically motivated to do it more.”

LA Times: “Data released this week from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that conducts research on sexual and reproductive health, shows that the teen pregnancy rate rose 3% in 2006, the first increase since the late ‘80s.”

That’s an extraordinary amount of content kids are downloading directly into their brains. Even if all of that data was positive or content-neutral—and the idea of content-neutral data is fishy, at best—the sheer amount of it is shaping the way kids (and, honestly, all of the rest of us) process information.

One of the central themes of Real World Parents is that we look for real world opportunities to talk to our kids about truth and wisdom. We’re big believers that our inescapable popular culture gives us those opportunities in abundance—if we’re willing to overcome the inertia of the “it’s just a movie” cop-out.